Appfolio Engineering

At Appfolio we take pride in having a high quality internship program. This year, at the end of the summer, two interns chose to write up their thoughts on the summer that the spent with us.

Christopher Chen, from Berkeley, had the following to say about our software engineering internship:

When I first started at Appfolio, I had two prior technical internships, the first at a very large company, and the second at a small company. Neither of them were what I’d call inspiring and the first actually made me question majoring in computer science. Starting in October of my junior year, I applied to many of the large, well-known, Bay Area tech companies with mixed responses. Appfolio was an afterthought at the time since I’ve never heard of the company before. Weighing the offers of multiple companies, I eventually chose to go to Appfolio due to its strong employee satisfaction on Glassdoor.

Soon it was mid-May, the end of my second semester as a junior, and the beginning of my internship. I was unsure of what to expect - my friends were interning at large Bay Area tech companies, meanwhile what well-known tech companies are located in Santa Barbara? (surprisingly many, as it turns out)

My concerns were put to rest on the first day; interns were given Macbook Pros to work with, in a modern office setting with desks that could go from standing to sitting height at the touch of a button. Snacks were a-plenty and it was overall a great work environment.

I began with a 2-week training session in Ruby on Rails, building enough technical knowledge to begin working in a team - I would continue to learn as I developed new features. I also participated in team decision-making and it struck me how seriously I was being taken, even as a fresh intern. The team welcomed my ideas and almost immediately I was accepted into the team, not as an intern, but as an engineer.

As I type this sitting at my desk on my final day after 3 months, I reflect on how different this internship was from my previous one. At one of my previous internships, my mentor was a man who was well-known in his field, regularly taught graduate classes, had many patents under his name, and was otherwise very respected. However, I was lucky to get an hour per week from him. Here at Appfolio, Natalie, my very bright and hardworking mentor, was always willing to spend time with me. Under her guidance, and that of the entire team’s, I built many customer-facing features, those that would later bring about highly positive customer feedback. Through being productive, I also learned more than I did at any other internship. Beyond technical skills (like learning an entirely new language and web development stack), I also learned and refined social skills like working effectively in a team setting and buying in on the company culture.

The main difference, and the best one, was how much trust I was given. I hit the ground running with a non-trivial project (unlike those of my previous internships) that was immediately utilized in the live release. I was able to directly speak to customers about features they want and needs they need fulfilled. What I was able to get done was fulfilling for the customers and for me - it was my first experience as a “real” engineer in a software company, not the intern whose time was worth little.

Sophia Zheng, also from Berkeley, had this to say about our product management internship:

Adjusting to a new workplace can be hard for anyone, but AppFolio has a way of seamlessly incorporating interns into the company. During my first couple weeks at AppFolio, I attended several sessions that taught me the skills I needed to be an effective employee.

From there, I was put on two teams that were working on features that would go live to all customers, and I think this is what distinguishes an AppFolio internship from other internships. Instead of putting all the interns on an intern project that may or may not be used in the end, interns are given the same responsibilities as regular employees. As a product intern, I was given my own feature to product manage--I can’t say that’s common for many other product management internships. I got my own product management experience, from working with developers and user experience to contacting customers for research. During my internship, we pushed out two major stories for the feature I was in charge of to all customers.

I was also given two other projects: I got my own personal research project and I was put on a market validation team. During market validation meetings, my thoughts were acknowledged and taken into consideration, and the results of my research were taken seriously.

AppFolio truly does an amazing job at making sure interns do work that matters to the company. I will say this though: if you take an internship at AppFolio, also be prepared to play a lot of foosball.